¡Colores!; 1008; Mayhem was Our Business: Memorias de un Veterano; Interview; Part 1

Let's just remember because we're on free run that we need to give at least five second roll up before we start anything because of the five second queuing in the other room. This is just conversation. I'll be right here. Tell me when you're ready. So many stories.

You told me a lot of interesting stuff in our last show that never made it in. I'm really kind of curious about some of those things and I hope we can kind of cover them this time around. Tell me a little bit about your experiences in the war. I was in Tiramarilla when it was announced over the radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. There was about two feet of snow on the ground and I was late in the evening. The following morning, before the sun came out, there were lines of young men that were lined up at the track board to enlist for the war. They came out of the villages, they came out of the mountains from all over the northern country to enlist. I think pause for just a sec.

We made a mistake. You can just, there you go. Remind us. They came out. You were saying how they came out. They came out of the villages, they came out of the mountains, they came out of the ranches to enlist. And that established the pattern. The state of New Mexico is full of Hispanic volunteers. I come from a family of three brothers. All three of us were volunteers. That was not unusual. That was the pattern. That for my people in northern New Mexico, patriotism was a very real and fiery reality. My people had found in northern New Mexico the freedom, the liberty that the Hispanic peoples have been searching all over the world always.

And we found it there. And for us, we were not fighting for the great cities like New York, Chicago, San Francisco. None of us had ever been there. They weren't real to us. We weren't fighting for the waves of grain and corn of the Midwest. We weren't fighting for the oil derics in Texas. No, we were fighting for the cattle, the sheep and the horses that were our livelihood. That was the economy of northern New Mexico.

The season is too short for farming. So stock raising is the main industry. And when stock raising ceased in the northern communities, the economy went down. Tierra Maria is today her ghost town. Do you remember going down and signing up? Do you remember what you were feeling at the time? Look, I didn't sign up in Tierra Maria. I signed up in Santa Fe. And I didn't sign up right then and there. I signed up later.

In the meantime, you see, as I was growing up, my father said that I was going to go to Georgetown. And that I was going to be a lawyer. I found that to be a great idea. And I spent a lot of time fantasizing about addressing a dramatic fiery speech to a jury. But then my father died and I couldn't go to Georgetown. So I came to UNM instead and the war came and instead of going off to war, I went off to Washington, D.C. And I enrolled at George Washington University because I found out I couldn't afford Georgetown. Because frankly, I felt that I had waited long enough that I was entitled to it.

I had been raising my brothers and sisters. And besides, I didn't want to be cannon fodder. But I didn't count with my conscience. I worked in a building with 500 employees in Washington. There were only 12 men, the rest were women. And those 12 men, they were over 60 or six, four F. And I was a young man of 20. And it was embarrassing. I had to shave every morning. So I went to my supervisor and asked for, I told him I want to resign after three months.

And they told me I couldn't resign. I was an interpreter for the war department. And they said, I was frozen to my job. And I said, well, let me talk to your supervisor. And I went to the next supervisor and got the same answer in the next one. I practically had to go all the way to the Secretary of Water. I finally ended up in the office of a quite hearing kernel. And it says, why do you want to resign? And I said, there's a war going on out there. And I want to be in it. And I thought I could avoid it, but I can't. And he got up from behind his desk, came around and put his arm on my shoulder.

He says, I know how you feel, son, because I feel the same way. And I came home, got married, and enlisted in the same week. What did your mom think about you in the last thing? What did your family think? My mom died too. All I had was my brothers and sisters. And one of them was sixteen, the boy. And when I left for the Army, two weeks later, he enlisted. In the Navy, he lied about his age and enlisted. And the other one had already enlisted. And my wife was to take care of the boy and the girl, the girl was seven.

But the boy left, and the girl remained with my wife. Do you remember what you were thinking when you enlisted? Do you remember leaving home and what was going through your mind? Well, I said that patriotism was a fiery thing with us. I felt very strongly that I had to do something about it. And I think probably I even felt guilty because my father had not gone to the First World War. He was excused from a draft because he was a stock racer. And the war effort needed meat for the soldiers. So he never went to the war.

And somehow, the way down deep inside, I think I felt guilty about that. And that I had to make up for it. Do you remember signing on the dotted line or driving away in the car, or that one move that brought you into the service? No, I didn't drive off. I reported at Santa Fe that the Army Air Force office. And they put me on a bus and then shipped me off to California. What were you thinking on the bus? Well, you see, for every American soldier that signed up, he was leaving home. And that is a very dramatic feeling when you're going off to war. But for me, and my people, it was not only leaving home,

we were leaving our culture behind. And when I wrote this book about my experiences in the war, it was very, very evident. All of my writing, I've written about 15 books. I always write in Spanish and then translate them into English. Translate my stories into English. Here I was writing my experiences in the Second World War. And they wouldn't come in Spanish. They came in English. This is the first and only book that I've written in English and then translated. Why? Because the experiences during the war were outside of my element, outside of my cultural sphere, away from my people, with other people.

You see, let's stop for just a second. Go ahead. I wouldn't go further. Also the mic. Where is it hitting? He was just, I mean, you couldn't help it. Don't worry about that. You just have to knock it down a couple of times. That's fine. We are fine. Do you want some water? No. Keep rolling. Just keep rolling. Yep. Okay. Do you see how you look for a second? Sure. Sure. I think you look better, but... That's not my fault. That matter of fact, you don't turn me on at all. All right.

Now that you two have had your fun. What interesting experience was that in all the three years I was in uniform, I never had a chance to speak Spanish. And when I came home, I'd be sitting at the table with my wife speaking Spanish, but stumbling over the language. It seemed that I had forgotten my Spanish. It was icky and awkward and embarrassing. It turned out I hadn't forgotten my Spanish. What I had forgotten was the rhythm, the fluency. It wasn't a flow.

It was jerky. I got over that in a very short time. And being a language teacher, I've always told my students that a language is a skill. That once you learn a language, you'll never forget it. Well, you may forget to vocabulary. But the other things that you learned, you won't forget. It's like learning to write a bicycle. You may stay away from a bicycle for ten years. And when you get back on, oh, you may flounder around for a little. But then you'll straighten out, go on. And the same thing happens through the language. Pretty soon, with a little practice, I was back in it again. Maybe a tennis is a better example. If you stay away from tennis, will you lose your skills part of it? What a little practice gets you back in shape, and you're back in again.

Tell me one thing, why did you choose Air Force? Well, two reasons. One of them is that I was afraid of heights. I still am. When the Empire State Building went up to the top and looked over the side, and almost passed out. And I considered that to be a deficiency in my makeup, in my character, and that I had to overcome that. That was one reason. And the other reason was that I was not going to walk through the war. I wasn't going to freeze my butt, or sleep in the mud, the way the infantry people have to do it.

Most of the two reasons. So what did you wind up doing in the Air Force? I ended up being the Baltera Gunner in a B-17. A B-17 was called a flying fortress. And actually, it was a plane that won the war. We were blue combat missions over occupied Europe. You must have got a pretty good look at what you were doing since you were at the bottom of the plane. The bottom of the plane in the glass boat. Red ball with ball. They call it the ball turret. It's underneath the belly of the plane. And they had two 50 caliber machine guns. Were you afraid of heights?

Oh, yes. I think that the most courageous things I ever did was getting down into the ball turret the first time. We received our combat plane in Dyersburg, Tennessee. Then they assigned us a plane. And I had a chance to go down into the ball turret for the first time. And we were way up there. And I stuck my leg down in there. No further than that, I looked down through the glass and all I could see was the fields. And that gave you a tight feeling around your throat just everywhere. Then I stuck my leg down there in the prop wash. The wind from the propellers who grabbed it. And I just froze.

It took more guts and more courage to get down into that ball turret than it did to face the Germans in war later on. Where were you stationed? It was a place called... I remember. We have a tape running out. Take a little break.